Four years ago, voters went to the polls to cast their votes for the presidential election and later sat glued to their televisions to follow the endless hours of poll coverage in hopes of learning which candidate won the election.
In order for the news programs to report a winner, polling information must be collected from each state to determine which candidate won the majority of votes. “There’s a consortium that’s formed by all the different media organizations that purchase exit polling data from a particular group of opinion researchers who have, essentially, the ability to predict,” said UW-Madison political science Professor Dhaven Shah.